Ansible: Up and Running

Chapter 6. Deploying Mezzanine with Ansible

It’s time to write an Ansible playbook to deploy Mezzanine to a server. We’ll go through it step by step, but if you’re the type of person that starts off by reading the last page of a book to see how it ends,¹ you can find the full playbook at the end of this chapter as Example 6-27. It’s also available on GitHub. Check out the README before trying to run it directly.

I’ve tried to hew as closely as possible to the original Fabric scripts that Mezzanine author Stephen McDonald wrote.²

Listing Tasks in a Playbook

Before we dive into the guts of our playbook, let’s get a high-level view. The ansible-playbook command-line tool supports a flag called --list-tasks. This flag will print out the names of all of the tasks in a playbook. It’s a handy way to summarize what a playbook is going to do. Here’s how you use it:

$ ansible-playbook --list-tasks mezzanine.yml

Example 6-1 shows the output for the mezzanine.yml playbook in Example 6-27.

Example 6-1. List of tasks in Mezzanine playbook

playbook: mezzanine.yml play #1 (Deploy mezzanine on vagrant): install apt packages check out the repository on the host install required python packages install requirements.txt create a user create the database generate the settings file sync the database, apply migrations, collect static content set the site id set the admin password set the gunicorn config file set the supervisor config file set the nginx config file enable the nginx config file remove ...